


Something Between

by disenchanted



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Drinking, M/M, Queer Themes, alternate POV, discussion of suicide, int. lonely hearts club/amateur brothel - night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 18:59:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3661395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Oh life, oh life,</i> he thought, <i>what a lot of wrecked parties.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greerwatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/gifts).



> Written to the prompt: _I'm curious to get someone else's perspective on the Bridstow scene and/or the events of Alec's birthday party and its aftermath._ Not a long shot at all, as it turns out—that prompt immediately leapt out at me. It was exciting to expand minor characters and look into Alec's birthday party; I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Thanks to Lilliburlero for betaing.

Returning from the bath, Theo saw that on the kitchen table, atop the embroidered tablecloth, there was a pot of coffee and two mismatched cups. In his usual chair, which sat at the table's eight o'clock, Peter was critically surveying the evening paper. Though Theo said nothing, Peter, still with his eyes trained on the line he had been reading, began to lean back, preparing at length to enter into conversation. It was the sort of gesture that might have been expected from a father pestered by a clever, solicitous child; never mind that Theo was seven years older, and was the 'father' of the household insofar as he was the one who paid the two pounds per week for the flat.

'Is that coffee?' asked Theo, coming round to sit opposite Peter. 'I didn't think I'd any left.'

'Oh, no,' said Peter, 'well you don't now. I scraped some up from the bottom of the tin….'

Upon tasting the coffee Theo worried that it had been produced by somewhat viler means. He then idly wondered whether, if Peter was the father, it was quite right to be critical. When he was a boy it was his father who acted as arbiter of the household's taste, though it fell to his mother to adjust material fact to her husband's specifications. Perhaps if Peter brewed the coffee, Theo ought to be the one to pass judgment. In two days it would be a moot point: Peter was shipping out again. Theo would be husband and wife and child in one, or perhaps only a bachelor.

'My train got in earlier than expected,' said Peter conversationally, 'so I dropped by to see the Alexanders before coming back here. That's why I wasn't in when you came in from work.'

'Did you give them the money to replace the glass?'

'Oh—! That! Actually I didn't— But I greatly doubt either of them have given much thought to _the glass_.' Peter had taken up the manner of gossip. He leant forward and curled his hand, visibly sea-worn even after two weeks' home leave, around his cup, matching posture to language. The change wasn't disagreeable. He had a small fox-like mouth which was at its pleasantest during moments of mischief.

'Shall I bet on whether they were honeymooning or having it out?' As if to prove his disinterest, Theo leant back in his chair, throwing his arm casually over the back. 'Half a crown says the latter.'

'No, it had gone rather beyond that. We were right, as it turns out, to have left Alec's party when we did—'

'For which, if that's the case, you have me to thank.'

'I'm not being flippant. Well, maybe I am, considering. Have you seen Sandy since?'

'At the Two Crowns, I think. I don't remember. I'm sorry I interrupted. Tell me why we were right to have left.'

'This afternoon I saw that his arm was all wrapped up—like an Egyptian mummy, you know, or a syphilitic—and it wasn't that he'd burnt himself reaching into the oven, either. When he tottered off to the hospital I asked what it was all about; Alec insinuated it had happened the night of the party. He was tight-lipped, naturally, and at this junction I don't care to pry. I'm sure by the time I've got home leave again it will have all become common knowledge. That's really,' he said, lifting into the register of high camp, 'the price of this war: one returns to find one's titbits have gone staler than stale biscuit.'

Theo sought comfort in his coffee before realising how little comfort the concoction afforded. Moderating the curl of his lip, he said, 'So that's what had happened after we left? Ralph would have said things had deteriorated. Not such a sensitive gift, though, for one's friend's twenty-fourth, I have to say.'

'You've got two years left till mine. That's more than enough time to manage something passable, so I won't tolerate excuses. I also won't tolerate vases...there's nothing to be done with a vase.'

The bloodless delivery of the last line betrayed the turn Peter's thoughts had taken. In more intimate moments, Peter was apt to hint at, if not to totally disclose, his worries: attention came to him sometimes from other directions, he and Theo weren't wedded precisely, and there were, after all, such things as U-boats and depth charges, to say nothing of the segment of the Royal Navy which had been reduced to lying inert in burn wards. On the whole it was unlikely that in two years Theo would have the chance to follow in Sandy's footsteps, at least in the sense of ruining one's friend's birthday party.

Theo settled on saying, 'If the shops aren't filled up with bratwurst and beer steins. Though in that case I'll know at least to avoid the vases with the Führer on.'

Peter, taking a sip, said, 'This coffee isn't very good, is it? On second thought I ought to have made do with tea.'

In a wifely turn Theo rose to make a pot of tea, ignoring Peter's protests to the effect that he would have to become acclimated again to sorry messes. There was something in the ritual as he performed it—boiling the water, warming the pot, stirring in the leaves—that felt to Theo culpably home-front. He was reminded of playing teatime with the twin girls who had lived in the terraced house next to his own: folding old napkins into neat triangles, touching the tip of his middle finger lightly to the knob on the lid of the chipped ceramic pot. He had had, then, at seven or eight years old, blissfully little comprehension of what his pleasure in the game portended. Perhaps it wasn't a portent at all. Perhaps it was simply pleasure, rich and undemanding; the kind he had felt during his last dance with Peter, when their feet ached and they slumped together almost fraternally. Meanwhile, he remembered, Sandy had been following Alec as he moved through the room, hanging from the edge of the possibility that Alec would turn to him and take his cheek in his hand.

 

* * *

 

The first sip of one of Alec's cocktails was akin to the plunge into bed after three days awake, or possibly the plunge into bed after three hours kissing. Theo had been at Gloster since just after sunrise, reviewing turbojet designs which were perpetually not quite viable. His blue chalk stripe suit, already some years out of fashion, had gone wrinkled and sweat-stained, and beneath it his body sagged from the admittedly cushy tedium of hunching over a desk. Swilling gin and bitters, he felt he had been given a new directive: another chapter of the day was unfolding. The noise in the room was rising, and there were guests still trickling through the door.

'How is it?' Alec asked, as though he were contractually obligated to fix a proper drink. If Theo declared it too something-or-other, he would probably make it again.

'It's cured me of my ills,' said Theo, concealing with exaggeration an absolute truth. In a rush of goodwill he placed a hand on Alec's shoulder. 'But I haven't congratulated you. You're well on your way to being an old man.'

This was more than the requisite joke. Alec had always had the manner of the sort of elderly cornerstone who had seen too much to be shocked by iniquity but retained an earnest anger at injustice. Theo took comfort in imagining that in thirty or forty years, when all the rest of them were God-knows-where, Alec would remain in his white coat, albeit grey-haired, having matured into a sort of patron saint of unfortunate queers. At the same time Theo was obscurely shocked that anyone who had the means to be superior would choose to be otherwise.

Seeming to sense Theo's feeling, Alec smiled reservedly, as if concealing pity, and began to make Peter's drink in turn. He said, 'I do feel older than I did this time last year.'

The other Alexander bore, for better or for worse, the mixture of unreserved sensibility and tormented self-awareness usually seen in first formers. When Alec had come to the drinks cabinet, Sandy had followed, taking up the bitters so that Alec would have to beg them from him. He fulfilled the role of bitters-bearer solemnly; it was his habit to wield some token that proved his right to stand where he did, to take his place in the social order. He seemed now to be doing so in direct response to a corporal sat stiffly on a divan, pretending not to be listening in on nearby conversation. Alec's guest, then, Theo supposed, though it was Ralph Lanyon who was bringing him a drink. With this set, Theo was always left with the sense that some revelation had occurred just before he had entered the room.

'...Then he asked me whether it was a particular preoccupation of mine,' Peter was telling Sandy, knocking back gulps of his drink at each point of punctuation, 'and I—Yes, I know!—and really I wish I could have said, well I would have if we were anywhere else, My only preoccupation, I'll have you know, is with…'

From another cluster of guests Theo caught: 'And how long is that for? … Oh, that's longer than I thought; poor thing. Well, you'll have plenty of time to yourself, then, and that's not all bad, if you see what I mean! My own experience was always…' 

This snatch of conversation suggested to Theo the image of his own flat empty, the chairs tucked beneath the tables and the cups lined up in the cupboard. However real the scene had been and would be, Theo thought of it remotely.  With the blackout fixed and the lamps lighted, the sitting room seemed, for the evening, a space of total warmth. Faces were smoothed down into suggestions; bodies loosened from the posture taken on in the upright world, so that presently the room was patterned with the ogee arches of two men slumped towards each other in private conversation. Confessions were traded not so much on the worth of their information but on the intimate act of their being vocalised: when Sandy relayed to Peter that Ralph had taken issue with Alec, Peter took on the gleam of someone who has been trusted with the care of some small gem. If Peter later told Alfie what Sandy had told him, then never mind that that was what had got Alec into trouble in the first place. It was only another kindness, a multiplication of the wealth of unfettered sociability. And insult had no staying power: when the needle was off the record and the drinks cabinet had been shut up, this world would crawl back beneath the surface of the other, reducing the hurts and the joys alike to a glow behind the flat countenances of men more or less normal.

'I'm sorry,' Sandy broke out, 'it's just that I can't stand this sort of song. It's all anyone hears, and it's dire.' He parted from his group and swept towards the radiogram. One of the army officers had put on a terrifically insipid Tommy Dorsey number, with twinkling and 'ooh-ooh'ing; as a result all but the most ardent couples had stopped dancing. The soldier Claude had brought, still sitting in the same chair, had a far-off look which Theo assumed, perhaps uncharitably, was borne of fantasies of a girl back home. 'I mean, I was always under the impression,' Sandy continued, 'that dancing involved some movement of the body. Here you all are, all four of you that are left, standing perfectly still in the middle of the room.'

'Not in a sentimental mood, Sandy?' called one bystander. He seemed to be hinting that if Sandy ever did happen to be in such a mood he would be happy to assist him in the expression of it. 'Haven't you got someone whose shoulder you can put your head on?'

'My dear,' said Sandy, 'what I have _got_ are better things to do'—the first of which, as it transpired, was to give a tellingly scratchy 'Sing Sing Sing' its dozenth go-round.

'Come,' said Peter, touching Theo's elbow, nodding towards a square foot of carpet free from any other dancers. When Theo showed signs of demurring, Peter tried to drag him by the arm. He had had more than a couple of Alec's specials, and besides was in the throes of terror at the end of his leave. All his regrets were confronting him at once: presumably the easiest to rectify at present was that of not having danced enough. 'Look, everyone else is, now. No one will take notice of your stumping about.'

'I'll step on your toes,' warned Theo. Beneath this surface petulance he felt himself on the cusp of conceding; he was reassured by the clasp of Peter's hand at his forearm, and had drunk more than enough to allow his modesty to fall by the wayside. Just then, however, there was a racket on the landing, and the door opened to reveal a middle-aged civilian heading a dour sampling of naval ratings.

'Oh,' said Peter, dropping Theo's arm, 'I did feel that something was missing….' 

As a good portion of the dancers moved towards the doorway in hopes of catching a glimpse of the proceedings—from what Theo could see, Alec was raising his hand as if in illustration of a spoken point, and Sandy was doing a sort of sheepdog impression in attempt to get the ratings down the stairs again—the fervent trilling of 'Sing Sing Sing' became absurd, like an armchair standing upright in a bombed-out sitting room. Peter, too self-assured to be embarrassed by proxy, laughed. He had reason to laugh: there was nothing like the effort of ejecting an unwanted guest to unite the whole of a party. The person who had bothered Sandy about sentiment was now assisting him in convincing Harry to follow his ratings. Claude's soldier was looking on with renewed interest, much in the manner of a dog who has observed a bird outside his kennel. Mirroring him was the corporal whom Ralph had once more left alone; he was resting his hands on his knees and glancing every now and then at the door, sidelong, seeming to have come to a fatal crossroads of disgust and anticipation. He ought to cheer up, thought Theo: there was at least no chance of Ralph going back to sea.

When Sandy returned triumphant, or anyway in need of a drink, Peter said, 'What, you've got rid of the life of the party? He must've been threatening to show you up. —By the way, take this, it's strong enough.'

Sandy, raising his fair eyebrows severely, said, 'He was threatening _something_ towards the end. But if ever there were a person _not_ suited to blackmailing— It was like seeing Wilde press an MP for another couple of pounds. Which isn't to say that in this instance I was the MP.'

Threaded through these theatrics was the brittle nervousness of a near-miss. Sandy had been shaken; the amusement of the circumstance had shrivelled and withdrawn, leaving in its place a confusion that rattled noisily through the alert mind. After giving a stunned flash of teeth, Sandy took a swig of the drink Peter had made. Though with another swig his twitching fingers settled, a deep flush spread through his cheeks.

'Alec thinks he's salvageable,' said Sandy, as if Theo had raised some objection.

Theo, who knew well enough not to argue with Sandy over any opinion of Alec's, said, 'Oh, I'm sure.'

'He always does think people can be. Helped, that is. I suspect that's why— Ah, here's Ralph. He'll love this, won't he? I do like being the one to break the news.' Without a backwards glance, Sandy wavered off, clinging to the buoy of Peter's drink.

 

* * *

 

'Fretting over the Whittle engine?' asked Peter.

For several minutes Theo had been standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the blackout curtain as if he were able to see through the window behind. The teapot stood in the sink, submerged in soapy water; Theo had left it abandoned halfway through washing. In lieu of sipping, Peter had turned to smoking, and sat at the table blowing languid rings.

'Hmm?' Theo glanced over, hoping to remember what they had just been saying. 'Oh, hush. I'm not, strictly speaking, meant to be telling you about all that….'

'Well, if my jawing does sink ships, it'll be me who's the worse for it.'

'No, actually,' said Theo, taking up the wet dishcloth and resuming his scrubbing, 'it's nothing like that. It was just that I was wondering why exactly he did it—Sandy, that is; why he was driven at that point… Surely if it was premeditated he'd have chosen some other time. Or not; it could well have been his intention all along.'

'Nothing about Sandy is premeditated,' said Peter, with the sly laughter of someone who finds he has unwittingly revealed one of the truths of a friend's personality. 'He's not the type, you know, to write a letter and then take his shoes off, and so on.'

One side-effect of an intimacy with queers, Theo reflected, was an intimacy with the various types of the suicidal. Like blackmail, like pin-dropping, suicide was one of those reliable features of the social landscape: there was always something or other happening to somebody one knew. Even Theo had had his bad turns—before Peter, thank God, or the conversation would have taken on rather a different significance. Theo felt keenly the privilege of being able to regard this as the newest item of gossip. In fact he felt compelled to attach himself wholly to that point of view, and took care not to betray anything that might have been called feeling.

'But I mean,' said Theo, 'all throughout the party he was grasping. What was really painful about it all was that he clearly had some hope.'

'Like an oil baron's daughter at Belgrave Square….' Peter shot a plume of smoke from the side of his quirked mouth.

'Well, I wouldn't call it Belgrave Square, even amongst our set. Probably that would be Max's, and Sandy's hardly a feature there. On second thought, he must have been thinking of himself as the hostess—a Mrs Ronnie type, if we're assigning likenesses. I've actually heard him talk of things in terms of their being “successes” or not.'

'You've got to wonder what the devil he thinks would make a success. Aha-ha—' Leaning back in his chair, which gave a worrying creak as it tipped onto two legs, Peter said, 'I have the image of him sitting in one of those Swedish chairs, surrounded by a sort of Greek chorus—odd mix of nationalities, I know—a Greek chorus who shriek every time he says something he imagines is clever. ...Really the more realistic thing would be him and Alec alone in a room together. Theo, are we living out his fantasy just now? Had we better feel very, very guilty?'

'Not at all,' said Theo. 'If Alec were in the service Sandy wouldn't have lasted long enough to throw the party.' Though he said this with a laugh, he felt unwillingly a throb of guilt. On occasion he was beset by the worry that such minor, private cruelties would turn out to be boomerangs. To console himself, he recalled catching Sandy telling Toto Phelps about a matter he had just assured Theo was all in the past. If any one of them were damned, the whole lot of them were damned.

Becoming a touch serious, Peter took his cigarette from his mouth, let his chair drop back onto all four of its legs, and said, 'But really, was it not obvious what it was?'

'What what—oh, you're still on about that.' Theo set about the task of drying the pot with perhaps more attention than it merited. 'Gossip aside, I don't think any of us are really capable of speculating. The mysteries of the mind, and so forth. I mean, we've all read Freud, but…'

' _Apparently_ what happened was that just after we left, Alec got a bee in his bonnet about some thing or other and was really more of a bitch about it than was strictly necessary. _Apparently_ he made rather an ass of Sandy, and in front of Ralph and his new friend—well, I say it's a man's birthday, he's got _carte blanche_ to make an ass of whom he likes. You remember my last. But you know Sandy, he latches on to things, he thinks it's all a part of some conspiracy….'

Peter had become bored of the story over the course of its telling. He tapped out his cigarette and took a fresh one from the packet, but rather than lighting it spun it between his fingers. With another loud creak he rocked back in his chair, spreading his legs for balance. He looked, thought Theo, very young; on the bridge of his nose there remained some summer freckles, which spoke to Theo of the long vac and holidays to Jersey. All of that was fantasy now: Peter had earned these freckles on the deck of a destroyer doing Northern Patrol duty. If he was lucky enough to return again, he would do so bearing the freckles of a more southerly sun: he was being sent to the East Mediterranean. But Peter wasn't, strictly speaking, meant to have been telling Theo about all that. Officially Theo knew only that Peter had been gone, and would be going.

 

* * *

 

When Theo rejoined the party after a sojourn in the lavatory, he became aware that something had transpired in his absence. It was _déjà vu_ all over again, he thought tiredly. Sandy was flitting from corner to corner, tugging at sleeves and distributing drinks, in what was transparently a mad attempt to inject silliness into a situation from which all such pleasurable feeling had been sapped. The only person at all responsive to the attempt was Bim Taylor, who had come in just as Theo was going; he was gulping down a whiskey double, ignoring Alec's entreaty that he go home and take a bromide. At Bim's other side was Ralph, exercising his not unimpressive physical strength in pressing Bim towards the door. Ralph's real concern was plainly the corporal, whom Theo had learnt was called Odell—without the apostrophe, Alfie had stressed. 

By the glances that passed between the four of them—glances in turns anxious, suspicious, and downright chilling—Theo could make a guess at the nature of the problem. Someone on the fringe of the group made a remark about 'this sort of party', but the association that came most readily to Theo was that of a similar scene at a Gloster do, albeit with a WAAF in place of Odell. Oh life, oh life, he thought, what a lot of wrecked parties.

'You had better sleep while you're able,' Alec was saying. 'God knows when you'll get another chance.'

'Oh, I'm flying high, my darling, even now,' rejoined Bim. 'Don't tell me you'd rather see me crash, just when the dancing has got so irregular; that's traitorous. I know you're not the type to waggle your finger at a bit of fun. Just remember the time you—'

'Look here,' said Ralph, 'my car is just down the street. I'm taking you home.'

'Ralph!' cried Bim, laughing, 'have I told you how bloody it's been without you? All this time it was that touch of Plymouth Brethren I'd been aching for.' Another of those chilling looks, Theo noticed, passed between Alec and Ralph. 'So solemn, dear, so hard-hearted, I'm in pieces…. Just _who_ will put me together again?'

This was the question that wanted answering. Evidently the RAF hadn't found it necessary to shoulder the responsibility. It had probably long since abandoned Bim's personality as a lost cause; however a modicum of his fine motor skills were still intact, so the man couldn't be said to have been totally destroyed. Theo had heard of a Spitfire pilot who had been shot down over the Channel earlier that summer; he had nearly drowned, but by a stroke of luck got away with extensive damage to the face and hands, and was now undergoing a series of fiddly operations in hopes of being declared fit to fly again. It was still to be seen whether any serviceman in their set would manage to avoid a stint in hospital, or for that matter remain ineligible for disability pension. Theo wished he had been acquainted with Ralph before he was wounded, so that he would know whether or not to take him as a model for a potential Peter. That wouldn't, Theo supposed, be all bad: in an amazing upset Ralph had got Bim to agree to be driven home.

'You owe me at least five more drinks,' Bim was calling to Alec from the landing, 'so you had better plan on having another party…. When is Sandy's birthday? When is mine?'

Peter, for his part, was sitting on one of the pouffes to the side of the room, nursing his drink with a soreness which the seat made comical. When Theo left, Peter had been in high spirits, careening from one partner to the other. Though Theo could imagine what might have changed Peter's mood so rapidly, he had little interest in taking on the burden of consolation, and still littler interest in taking on the burden of vengeance. Peter often demanded that Theo be the one to redress an insult, not because he himself was incapable, but because he took the beloved's pleasure in seeing effort made on his behalf. However, Peter just as often took it upon himself to reverse the roles: it was Peter, in the end, who had chastised Sandy for telling Toto what he did. Theo detected in himself a growing fondness, and ascribed the untimely emotion to the gin and bitters. Perhaps, Theo considered, it was some secret ingredient in Alec's specials that induced ridiculous devotion to one's friend; that would explain Sandy, certainly.

'What's this frowning about, now?' said Theo, struggling to seat himself on an adjacent pouffe. 'Don't tell me you've crossed over to the moral side?'

'Hell no, but I wish Claude would.' Peter was beginning already to regain his carelessness; either whatever had happened had not been too bad, or Peter was close to achieving the state of inebriation which bestowed a godlike disinterest. When Peter nearly slid off his pouffe, Theo began to worry it was the latter. Then again the pouffe was in terms of function far from ideal.

'What did he say?' asked Theo dully. Before he was able to stay himself, he went on: 'No—he didn't! How could he?'

Peter took a grimacing drink; his curled lip tore the childishness away from his fair, freckled face. Just as soon as the expression had appeared it was made childish again by an awkward, barking laugh, the sort Theo had heard him use in response to dirty jokes that assumed experience with women. 'He said he could tell by the way I walked that you were frigid, and that if I liked he could set me up with someone who would put a half foot of space between my thighs.' A disbelieving giggle followed, like a regurgitation of words that didn't agree with his stomach.

'He must be blind,' said Theo. 'Blind drunk, that is....'

Theo looked over to Claude and saw that he was in a corner, ignoring the person speaking to him; he surveyed the room with a displeasure so severe Theo felt inclined to remind him that he and his rent had been welcomed to the flat as guests. If Theo were more sympathetic, as indeed some of their set were, he might have viewed Claude's behaviour in light of the utter tragedy of his circumstances—Claude, like Ralph, had been expelled from school, though in Claude's case the liaison was with a master who had been fonder of Claude than Claude was of him—but to Theo it was the behaviour that coloured the tragedy, giving it a ridiculousness that his sense of fair play couldn't fully shake. Even Peter's frustration was silly. The one Theo felt sorry for was the soldier. For several hours now he had been waiting patiently, almost sweetly, for Claude to make use of him. From a certain angle it bore a frightening resemblance to love.

Because he couldn't very well ask the soldier to boogie-woogie his troubles away, Theo heaved himself up from his pouffe and told Peter, 'All right, you want a dance, I'll damned well give you one.'

'You'll step on my feet,' said Peter sourly. He had a knack for storing away one's little stupidities and retrieving them at key moments. That quick recall was part of what had brought him up to lieutenant, thought Theo, feeling a little prideful.

'Oh yes,' said Theo, as solemnly as he could manage, 'but in an adoring manner. It's a new thing, it's called toe-pinching worship; it's just like bothering a saint to do you some favour.'

'And how is that?' asked Peter, glancing up with a curious eye. The camp of good humour, very unlike that of insult or defence, was shaking a little trill into his words. 'I'm sure I don't know what sort of favour a saint like you would be able to grant me.'

That, Theo assured Peter, taking him up, he would find out soon enough. Stranger mysteries were on the verge of revealing themselves: they had joined the arcane group-ritual of the midnight dance. They gambolled, they were ugly and ungainly; sweat soaked triangles into the backs of their shirts; and their forelocks, which earlier that evening they had combed and shaped with jasmine oil, fell limp. The rouge of English inebriation had come into their shining, smiling faces. 

The flat, too, had suffered: over the various chairs and sofas, jackets lay discarded, wilting in the overwarm air; empty glasses and full ashtrays crowded all surfaces; the rugs were darkened by the tacky stains of spilt drinks. On a divan, a person was sprawled face-down with his hand extended, like a queeny dead Caesar in some picture. Sandy, looking equally betrayed, was thrusting near-empty bottles back into the drinks cabinet with a clangour that rivalled the radiogram. And from the radiogram there issued a shout of 'Pennsylvania six-five-thousand!'

'We've made a hell of a mess,' said Peter, pressing his face into Theo's neck. It was unclear whether he meant of the flat—an injudicious gesture of Peter's had shattered a highball glass—or of themselves. Their drunkenness was such that their movement failed to fit any standard definition of dancing: they clung to each other, swaying, grasping ineffectually for some hold. In each other's arms they grew feverishly hot. 'Oh hell,' Peter was saying, 'Oh hell….'

Wiping his thumb over Peter's ruddy cheek, Theo said, 'We had better get going to bed.'

'Go to the devil,' said Peter tenderly.

'Yes, we'll go to the devil by way of the bed: it's the quickest route, I've heard.'

'Is that what you've heard,' sighed Peter. Already the mystery of the moment was disintegrating, falling away to reveal a handful of drunk men in a dirtied flat. Still they were impelled to remain attached, perhaps because they had identified each other as sites of an unusual safety. 'Let me just pop over and give my farewells to Alec.'

'Say, Sandy,' said Theo, letting go of Peter. 'We're just going: would you be so sweet as to fetch Alec for us?'

'Oh, I really don't know.' Sandy set down a bottle of Campari so vigorously that the noise turned heads. There were children, Theo thought, who got upset at finding they weren't the star of someone else's birthday party. 'He's engaged at the moment, he may not be very pleased at being disturbed. You might ask him yourself; _I_ don't want to be the one to tug at his shirtsleeves.' 

This was said with the clear intent of goading Peter and Theo to unite with him against Alec, who after all was hidden in a corner, speaking quietly and attentively to Odell. The conversation had the look of one of those startlingly sudden confidences which come about only at these parties and at this hour.

Was that the sort of conversation, Theo wondered, that Alec and Sandy had when they were alone? Did Sandy have it with anyone? Theo found it impossible to imagine; he found it impossible to imagine anything not contained in the hazy pinhole of his vision. There was Sandy, glowering; there was someone's left shoe; there was Peter's hand, worn, burnt a little by an errant cigarette. Must find a plaster, he reminded himself. There was the blackout, there was Alec making a joke Odell failed to laugh at. There was the scent of coffee brewing, heralding the morning…. 

'I'm sorry, I didn't realise how late it was.' Alec placed his hand on Peter's shoulder, as much, it seemed, to support him as to reaffirm their familiarity. 'Thanks terribly for sticking your heads in, anyway. I was glad to see you before you went. Safe journeys.'

'Likewise,' said Peter, 'and happy birthday again—'

'Thank you again for the gift; I can't tell you how pleased I am, really.'

'No, no, I thought it might tickle….'

'Ah, careful there.'

'Whoops! I'm all right. I'm lucky I've got my chauffeur here.'

'Are you all right to drive, Theo?'

'Thanks, perfectly all right.'

'All right. Good-night.'

'Good-night.'

'Good-night!'

'Sleep well, my dear.'

'Oh, there's no counting on that.'

'Well, then, good-night.'

'Yes, good-night, dear.'

As Peter and Theo made their way onto the landing they heard the gentle murmurs of conversation resumed; then Sandy, with a soft huff to himself, slammed the door, and in the stairwell they shared the laughter of survivors. Without the light from the open door and the noise of the dying party, the atmosphere of the stairwell, still and dark, had a stifling effect. They began to go slowly, descending the staircase with the overawed carefulness of a child creeping down on Christmas morning. Peter stumbled on the next landing, and Theo, laughing, caught hold of him. Just before they embraced, there was the noise of a door clicking open, and a female voice asking whether they knew that there were people sleeping. So there was, after all, no embrace: whispering apologies, they stumbled out of that grand old mausoleum and went in search of Theo's car.

 

* * *

 

Earlier that summer, about the time Ralph was getting his fingers blown off, Dickie Green shut himself up in his Bridstow bedsit and turned on the gas stove. He was found the next morning, blue in the face, by his landlady, to whom he had owed six weeks' rent. Fred Paget, who had been sent in after the fact to sort through Dickie's things, said that the pitiful bedsit—the fly-speckled dishes, the sagging single bed, the women's clothes in the wardrobe—lent the scene a Dickensian squalidity, a pathos almost too intense to take seriously. The funeral was much the same: though it had been organised by Dickie's mother, a woman in sore need of illusions, the pews of the low-church chapel were populated largely by screaming queens who had, in grief, regressed to a state of alarming butchness.

Fred, perhaps because he had been as close to the thing as anyone, was the only one to remain unbowed by the tyranny of personality established in the wake of Dickie's death. The rest of their set had, for a week or a month, become subordinate to Dickie in a way they would have loathed if he were living. Some raised Dickie to the status of a mascot, presiding auspiciously over parties, films, and endeavours in love—the latter even in the case of his boy friend's attachment to someone quite new. Others were bound to him by the sheer force of their attempt to distance themselves from any previous association; they talked so unendingly about the ridiculousness of it, the thoughtlessness, the embarrassment, that one had the sense they were convincing themselves not to follow. 

What would it have been like, Theo wondered, if Sandy had succeeded Dickie? He could imagine the string of stricken looks, the dry utterance: 'He's actually done it? Christ….' The crowding around Alec, the breezy dropping-in: 'I thought I would look in and see how you're getting on, but I see you're all right, so why I don't I just….' From the detritus of ordinary life, there would emerge a constellation of artefacts which roughly marked out Sandy's silhouette: twelve-piece jazz bands, crayon drawings of handsome men, red Bakelite cigarette holders, cocktails with cherries in. If ever Alec dared to give another party, those fits and starts of recollection, bound in by the primal space, would gather into a final, absolute lamentation: all together they would mourn the possibility that if they were quiet enough, correct enough, they might prove invulnerable; that if they clung tightly enough to friends and lovers they might remain hidden in perpetuity. Theo couldn't have said what Alec had wished for, shutting his eyes and putting out his twenty-four candles, but he suspected that most of the men there that evening harboured wishes along those lines. That was the desire which united them; and that was true now, and would be true as long as there was some queer or other left alive. 

That was at least, thought Theo, his educated guess. Saying good-bye to Peter—he had left him at the docks, greenish and grinning, his cap tilted unsmartly—had made him morbid. What was worse, he was unable to sweat out his thoughts properly, which is to say by driving fast down country lanes: to save on petrol he was taking the bus back into Bridstow. For what felt like hours he had been jostled along, snapping back at each stop and snapping forward at each acceleration. In moments of relative stillness he attempted to submerge himself in real melancholy, but was thwarted more often than not by the inevitable hard left. To his annoyance the ache behind his eyes was failing to materialise into actual liquid secretion. It was giving him a headache, and he hadn't anything for it; there were never doctors about when doctors were wanted.

Theo was rising from his seat with the intention of going the rest of the way on foot when the bus stopped and a parade of passengers began to board. A matron with gauze over her left eye; a small boy in a school blazer; a girl with the look of a typist, upon whose tweed a pen had leaked; a fair young doctor in a white coat, who was half-obscured by the other passengers for long enough that Theo was surprised when he at last identified him as Sandy Reid. 

It was clear that Sandy had seen Theo: one never avoided strangers so perfectly. Sandy was the sort who, when alone, made surreptitious sweeps of his surroundings in the hope that he might find some responsive face. Here's a response for you, Theo thought, and waved Sandy over just in time to frustrate the typist, who had been eyeing the empty seat next to him.

'Well, hello, hello,'  said Sandy, hollowly employing his characteristic greeting. 'Wouldn't you rather be in your car?'

Theo found it terrifically easy not to look at the sliver of strapping tape that extended past Sandy's sleeve. He said, 'Oh, yes, it's all I want, it's only that I'm being economical.'

'Peter's gone, isn't he?' Sandy's pink, translucent eyelids lowered. 'Wasn't that just today?'

'As a matter of fact, yes.'

'Mm, I'm sorry. I can't pretend to be familiar with the difficulty, but….'

'Oh, yes, yes, no, of course. It's not so bad really; this isn't the first time.'

'Still….'

'Still, yes, you're quite right. But I'm getting on.' As if he had been stupid for failing to ask: '—Are _you_?'

'Just as well as can be hoped.'

Directly Theo saw Sandy's expression he knew he had let it slip: a lack of subtlety was the price of concern. Sandy understood that as well as anyone. Between them, then, was the silent solidarity of having, at one point or another, given away too much of themselves. For this meeting they required no confession, no sacrifice to collective knowledge; they were fellow travellers. They leant back in their seats and swayed onwards. When the bright late sun came over the crest of the hill the bus was skirting, they raised their hands to their brows, and Sandy saw that Theo saw the strapping exposed. Well, here, Sandy seemed to say, peering past Theo and through the window—well, here we all are…. There they all were: on a bus or on a destroyer, at the hospital or at the station; at factories and offices, pubs and tea shops, bedsits and terraced houses; all moving according to the same measure, like the disparate heaves and groans of some enormous body, waking. 

Ridiculously, Theo pictured himself writing to Peter, telling him, _Have fallen slightly, temporarily and conditionally in love with Sandy Reid; do be tolerant, my dear, it'll all be over soon (that_ _isn't_ _a joke about Sandy)_. But Sandy was looking at Theo as if he were laughing at him from behind a fan, and Theo never did go in for carrying torches. He tried to wangle an inoffensive comment and found himself helpless: _Fine day…I was imagining that you were dead_. Sandy's left shoulder came up against his right; the faint pressure reminded Theo that Sandy felt its mirror. All at once Theo was brilliantly pleased to tumble here and there with the shuddering of the bus, and to blink away the purple spots which the sun burnt in. He couldn't think of anything less extraordinary. 

When the sirens began to sound, Theo felt it was the inevitable consequence of all that had come before. This was all it was, now—air raids and strange meetings, and the sun in one's eyes. Of course they didn't drop bombs in daylight. Certain properties of the night made it ideal for dying; for a peculiar sort of living, also.

'Late in the day,' said Theo.

'It is, isn't it?'  Sandy had shut his eyes. With the light on his face the cool dark veins beneath his skin were visible; they carried, now, an association with the veins in his arms, and the bifurcated arteries, deep and tough, within the wrist. 'Well,' he went on lightly, 'it's been this way before.'

 

* * *

 


End file.
